Summer 2013 Solo Gospel Routine

This is the solo gospel routine (which ironically is a solo routine in team form…) we performed at Swing L’ete here in Montréal yesterday. When I say my team members “performed”, I really mean my team members “went buckwild like [a] prodigy child[s]” (shout-outs to D Cru). Really, they did. Watch their faces, they are going nuts the entire time and had the whole “I’m going to bunch a baby in the face” crazy eyes thing going on.

The creative process of putting this routine together was soooooo satisfying that it’s hard for me to even type it up on this blog post how I felt every Sunday morning… every ungodly (ed. see what I did there?) Sunday rehearsal morning. This routine only really worked out because my team believed in what I was getting them to do without though they had zero idea how it might turn out. For all they knew, we could have just been running around being silly with our arm flailing. Because they believed in what I was doing, I pushed myself even harder to make it better each practice and made sure they got as much feedback and 1-1s with me throughout the week as my vagabond lifestyle would allow. To be honest, it was a lot of work. I would say probably double the amount of time that I had originally planned.

Creating the choreography was pretty different from my usual dance work process in that I would choreograph a sectionessentially from the twenty or so minutes that it took for me to walk from my house to the studio every (ungodly) Sunday morning. It wasn’t because I was lazy or just a procrastinator that I did that. It was really because, at least for this choreography, Sunday morning was when I had the most creative juice in my little noggin’ (probably due to being still in a semi-asleep state). I would arrive at the studio and excitedly tell my team what it is I was thinking of having them do for the next hour and to their credit, about 95% of the time they agreed with it ;-). Haha, okay maybe it was more like 75% but that’s still a lot of percentages for a first time solo routine. Looking back on it though, it probably didn’t make too much sense until about two or three weeks before performing so maybe they are actually the crazy ones for going through with it. I’m pretty sure Erin is for reals crazy.